This week sees the welcome return to Futures of Alex Shvartsman with his story Staff meeting, as seen by the spam filter. Alex’s previous tales have touched on subjects as diverse as coffee, time travel, alien invasions, big business and more. You can read more of his work and find out what he is up to by visiting his website or following him on Twitter. Here he reveals how spam inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Staff meeting, as seen by the spam filter

I find spam fascinating.

Not the kind that comes in a can, but the torrent of information flung at you across all media — be it in the form of an e-mail from a Nigerian prince, a commercial on a loop blaring from the loudspeaker set up outside a cell-phone shop, or an unwanted thick envelope of coupons arriving via snail mail.

If art is the product of creative skill and imagination designed to produce emotion, then spam is art, because annoyance and frustration are emotions. But it is also a con, a confidence scam designed to prey upon the most gullible and naive among us, inflicted upon the populace via what hackers refer to as a ‘brute force’ method: send the ad to enough people and a few are bound to show interest.

The arms race between the e-mail spammers and the software engineers is real and ongoing. The ‘white hats’ teach software to recognize the unwanted solicitations, while the ‘black hats’ are busy coming up with yet another euphemism for erectile dysfunction that they hope might sneak past the spam filter.  It may be a stretch, but given this race it was possible to imagine the filter software becoming gradually smarter and one day evolving into an artificial intelligence.

And when it does, what will it think of the torrent of spam it was created to detect?

This is actually my second spam-inspired story at Nature Futures. If you enjoyed it, check out The tell-tale ear as well!

It’s some what fitting that on the day that marks “Back to the Future Day“, the latest story in Futures toys with time and family issues. Prime time is the second story from Jennifer Campbell-Hicks to appear in Futures (you can catch the first, Transference, here). You can keep up with Jennifer’s work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Prime time

Time travel is one of my favourite science-fiction devices. My first favourite television show that wasn’t a cartoon was Quantum Leap. I have a miniature TARDIS and Dalek on my desk at work. I’ve danced around time travel in a couple of stories, but this is my first real leap (see what I did there?) into that subgenre.

If I were going to write a time-travel story, I needed a twist that I hadn’t seen before. What I came up with: a malfunctioning machine that spits out the same traveller at the same point in his time line, over and over. Moreso, he comes out in multiples so the total number of his clones always equals a prime number. Why primes? Any machine that does complicated calcuations involving time and space would manifest its malfunction mathematically. It made sense.

My other favourite part of writing this story: the long-suffering teenage girl with a mad-scientist father. She handles the insanity much better than I would. Then again, I imagine she has dealt before with her father’s crazy inventions going haywire. This is her normal, living in American suburbia with a time machine in the basement.

There is a far-flung corner of the Universe where ‘Quantum Shorts’ are the very latest in haute couture — and to be fair some of the designs are very fetching, even if they really only suit species indigenous to a handful of moons many light years from Earth (you can sometimes get the garments on intergalactic mail order — but to carry the look off, it tends to help if you have more than five legs).

For the rest of us, the phrase Quantum Shorts means it is time for the annual competition run by the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. Launched in 2012, the competition seeks science-fiction inspiration in the quantum world. This year, it wants you to write a piece of flash fiction — no more than 1,000 words long — that in some way features something quantum. Up for grabs is a first prize of US$1,500 as well as a year’s subscription to the digital edition of Scientific American. The rules are simple: write a 1,000-word story and submit it via the Quantum Shorts website by 11.59 EST on 1 December 2015.

Nature Futures is delighted to be one of the judges this year and — assuming the temporal literature-transfer unit doesn’t blow another fuse — is eagerly looking forward to reading the entries in December.

There’s a host of useful links on the Quantum Shorts website to help inspire you. Here, Brian Crawford, who won the Quantum Shorts contest in 2013 with his story The Knight of Infinity, offers some insight into the competition. 

In this week’s Futures story, Naru Dames Sundar introduces us to the Copyfactory and the vagaries of scientific experimentation. You can check out more of Naru’s work on his website and by following him on Twitter. Here, he kindly explains what inspired his tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Copyfactory

Copyfactory started out as a hyper-kinetic action piece that involved distributed mind-states and gang warfare. Along the way, I began to think more about the mechanics of uploaded minds, a concept I have seen rendered in a variety of science fiction pieces over the years. In science and in engineering, the process of arriving at a thing is fraught with a field of discarded solutions; iterations that could have been.

What happens when these iterations are pieces of consciousness? What happens when these iterations, broken irreparably, have thoughts and feelings — and have that most primal of conscious desires, a will to live? From there the story wrote itself in a single sitting, although the ending eluded me until a day or two later. What I love about the story is the image of the fragments, the broken half-copies that stitch themselves together around a patchwork of memories.

Whether  it is a piece of music or a fragment of a poem, an idea does not need to be complete in order to inspire, to resonate. Most of the time, the idea of completeness itself is an illusion, a false ideal to strive for. As it is with ideas, so it is with ourselves.

Marissa Lingen makes a welcome return to Futures this week with her story The many media hypothesis. Marissa has previously given us stories that have delved into the robotic psyche, explored the ethics of time travel, wrestled with entanglement, examined genetic modification, toyed with artificial intelligence, introduced us to Mr Astounding, provided a glimpse of a temporal exam paper and taken a bet with Maxwell’s demon. You can keep up-to-date with her activities on her website or by following her on Twitter. Here Marissa explains the origins of her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The many media hypothesis

My grandmother doesn’t really get social media.

She’s an intelligent woman; she understands the theory. But on an emotional level, it doesn’t really register what it feels like. And we had supper together every night when I was a teenager, so she’s known a great many of my friends — so every once in a while she’ll ask: “Do you every hear from so-and-so?” And usually I’ll be able to answer: “She had a pirate-themed birthday party for her oldest last weekend,” or “He went to Yosemite on vacation this year.”

And … that kind of detail doesn’t mean I actually know what’s going on in the person’s life, what’s important to them or what’s going on in their innermost heart. But it’s the sort of detail that would have gone in a letter, in years past, or a phone call; it would presume an actual friendship rather than a constant stream of context-free pictures and comments.

So sometimes when I’m reading my social media, it feels to me like a glimpse into alternate worlds, where I stayed (or became) close friends with someone, where we would be in genuine contact, where we would write each other letters confiding our dreams and our problems.  The person who saw your vacation snaps is me.  The person who knows what they mean to you, well, that’s someone else, and so The many media hypothesis was born.

This month, the Futures story in Nature Physics is The golden pianist by Lyssa L Martin. Lyssa has just finished her postgraduate studies in molecular biology and biochemistry. In the midst of wrestling with her master’s thesis, she kindly took some time to reveal what inspired her tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing The golden pianist

We are making ever more complex robots for a vast number of purposes, and we are getting better at it all the time. Our culture is obsessed with convenience and the next best thing. What so many of us dream of is a true digital assistant, an artificial intelligence that understands us when we talk, foresees our needs before we do and learns as it goes. But in order to make an intelligence that understands us, it must think like us. As we build AIs more adept at understanding humans what we are essentially doing is making them more human. To quote Christof Koch: consciousness is “an immanent property of highly organized pieces of matter, such as brains”.

We have no evidence to think that brains built from silicon and gold are significantly different from brains with organic circuitry. As we build them in our own image we will gift them the properties that humans believe set us apart: abstract thought. If we do this believing that what we are building is not truly sentient, we are setting ourselves up to make the same mistakes that we hold against our ancestors; and we will leave our children to clean up the mess.

We have the option now to consider before we forge ahead, but if our history is any indication, we will build them, and there will be consequences.